Text overwrite in visual studio 2010

Really silly problem here.

In Visual Studio 2010, the text cursor has changed from the blinking line, to a blinking grey box around the characters. When I type overwrites the text in front of it.

I'm not sure how to get this off? It's like what happens when you press the insert key in microsoft word and overwrite mode gets turned on.

I'm working on a mac with a windows virtual machine so when I hit insert it's just a shortcut key for Parallels (the Virtual Machine program I'm running).

Would appreciate any help!!

If pressing the Insert key doesn't work, try doubleclicking the INS/OVR label in the lower right corner of Visual Studio.

I am using Visual Studio 2013 and Win 8.1. It was Shift + 0 (0 is my insert key) on the number pad of my laptop.

I'm using Visual Studio with Parallels/Win 7 on a MacBook laptop keyboard and the only thing that worked was Fn + Enter/Return (that's the Mac shortcut for Insert).

None of the solutions above were working for me. My workaround was to open the on-screen keyboard using the system settings (press Windows key and search for "keyboard" to find them). Once that's open you can click the Insert key on it.

Ran into this issue with Parallels and VS 2013. Command + Insert also fixed it in my setup, in addition to the accepted answer. On my Windows USB keyboard Command == WindowsKey.

Visual Studio : Right Bottom : Look for OVR label. Double Click on it.

Bingo...

If you don't have an insert key, and you're using Visual Studio 2019, then double-clicking the OVR text in the bottom right corner does not work. You'll have to use an on-screen keyboard, if you have one of those, or figure out what your insert key is mapped to. For me, on my mac keyboard hooked up to windows 10, it is the 0 key on the keypad.

press your keyboard Insert Key

I'm using Visual Studio 2019. I used the shortcut below:

Shift + Insert

there is 2 ways to disable this option :

• the first one is to go : Visual Studio, Tools > Options > Environment > Keyboard, remove the shortcut binding for Edit.OvertypeMode

• the other way to disable it is to use AutoHotKey or any other Key-Overwriting App

but i strongly recommend AutoHotKey because it allow you to specify what application you want the key to be disabled in, and keep the same key work when VS studio window is minimized or closed .

AutoHotKey also uses scripting language , thats the best part, so you have a large flexibility to do many things that other generic key-overwriting apps can-not do

1- after installing AutoHotKey create a new file ends with .ahk

2- type inside it the following script :

#IfWinActive ahk_exe devenv.exe   ; <<== perform only when visual studio Window is Active
Insert::Return                    ; <<== Force Empty return on (**Insert**) key
#IfWinActive                      ; <<== end of #If statement 

3- save the file , double click to run .
that's it ! .
go inside VS studio now and try to press Insert key ,
it wont work anymore unless you disable that script we just created .

Note : the Script need to be open everytime you open Visual Studio , so you could make the script start with windows , just put it inside the folder "AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup"

Just in case this happens to you on Mac: fn + i is what fixed it for me.